Threats, Bad Reviews For Conn. Restaurant After Sarah Huckabee Sanders Refused Service At Virginia Eatery With Same Name

The Red Hen Restaurant on Main Street in Old Saybrook. (STEPHEN DUNN / Hartford Courant)

On Friday night, about 525 miles from where White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being booted from a restaurant called the Red Hen in Lexington, Va., the owner of an Old Saybrook restaurant was riding out the evening rush at her identically named eatery.

It was a typically busy night at the Old Saybrook restaurant. Shelley Deproto turned each of its 16 tables twice, she said, “doing what we always do — serving food and drinks and wine, making everyone comfortable.”

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Deproto, who has owned the restaurant for five years, still had no idea what had happened at the Virginia establishment by 11 a.m. Saturday, when a pair of Google messages, like the first raindrops arriving ahead of a storm, informed her people were boycotting her restaurant.

Then, a third message mentioned Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Deproto Googled the White House spokeswoman, read that she had been asked to leave a small Virginia farm-to-table restaurant by its owner the night before, and began to see the line drawn by some Americans between the incident in Virginia and her small eatery not a quarter mile from the Connecticut River — the sole connection being a quaint, perfectly inoffensive name also shared by a Vermont bakery, a family-style restaurant in Swedesboro, N.J., and a bistro in Washington, D.C. None of the businesses are related or franchised.

“They said, ‘You’re done, and we’re coming to get you,’ ” she recalled. “It was ominous. The rage — there was such rage.”

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

She tried to explain, as she would spend most of the rest of the day explaining, that there were several restaurants in the country named the Red Hen, and that this one was in Old Saybrook, Conn.

She soon realized the callers didn’t care. “You calmly and politely explain there’s no affiliation, but they’re so wound up it doesn’t matter what you say,” she said. “They’re ready to go. They say what they were going to say, which is usually something incredibly insulting and threatening.”

“They know what they’re going to say,” she added, “and they’re going to say it to whoever picks up.”

Soon, the Facebook pages and Instagram accounts of the Old Saybrook Red Hen were flooded with vitriol. Deproto took them down. The restaurant’s online reservation system was flooded with fake bookings for large parties. A “Nancy Reagan” and a “Sarah Sanders” took out reservations. Callers placed large, expensive takeout orders for 100 people that Deproto was not naive enough to fill.

“I don’t think any of us realized we’d be caught in the middle of this, this crossfire,” Deproto said. She changed the voicemail greeting to stress her restaurant was in Connecticut. But the calls kept coming, mostly from area codes in North Carolina, Colorado and Texas, she said, a new snarling voice every 15 seconds. “As fast as I could delete the messages, we’d get another one.”

Worried a caller might make good on a threat, Deproto contemplated not opening Saturday night. “After the content of those messages, I was scared,” she said. “It was so mean-spirited and angry. It shakes you up.”

But she opened the restaurant, like every Saturday, at 5 p.m. Deproto usually oversees the kitchen, but that day she stood out front — the first line against any hecklers, or worse. Luckily, none showed.

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She’s now working with Yelp and TripAdvisor to expunge the scores of poor reviews left by people who have never set foot in Connecticut. She has not ruled out a name change.

“As far as politics go, I’ll make the calls to my representatives; I’ll go to a march,” she said. “But I don’t bring that to work with me. We believe a restaurant should be a neutral place, where you can unwind or celebrate or do whatever it is you came there to do, and be treated with kindness and respect.”